Twenty years and 12 features down the line, it’s still hard to peg the directorial sensibility of Michael Polish, with or without the presence of brother Mark as frequent co-writer and actor.
His output has been all over the place, from early Lynchian quirkfests to the very middle-of-the-road inspirational dramedy “The Astronaut Farmer,” not to mention mediocre genre exercises, a B&W Parisian romance (“For Lovers Only”).
a good movie about Jack Kerouac (“Big Sur”), and one about manure salesmen that’s about as good as that sounds (“The Smell of Success”).
It remains a puzzle whether his thematic interests are more laudably diverse than they are simply arbitrary.“Nona” is yet another departure, a primarily Spanish-language feature shot on location in Central America, touching on issues of illegal immigration and human trafficking.
The narrative’s picaresque road-trip majority doesn’t properly set up a late turn towards seriousness, draining
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